Like attention, working memory is one of the brain’s most crucial front-line functions. Everything you know and remember, whether it’s an event, a skill or a fascinating fact, started its journey into storage by going through your working memory.

But working memory is much more than just a clearing house for long-term memories. It has been described as the brain’s scratch pad&colon; the place where information is held and manipulated. If you are doing anything that requires effortful, focused thought, you are using your working memory.

In the 1970s, Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch of the University of York, UK, came up with an influential model to explain how the system works. The main component is the executive controller, which runs the show by focusing your attention on the relevant information.

It also kicks “slave” systems into action. One of these holds up to four pieces of visual information at a time; another can memorise about 2 seconds of sound, especially spoken words, which it loops over and over again (think of mentally repeating a phone number while you search for a pen). The third is the episodic buffer, which adds relevant information from long-term memory.

Even modest gains in working memory can improve general cognition

A weakness of this model is that working memory doesn’t occupy a discrete brain area that can be watched in action in a brain scanner. Because of this, some cognitive neuroscientists have suggested that it might ...

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